Thursday, January 31, 2008

The Escaped Inescapable

There are nights when I drive down these city streets, stereo humming, lights on the street whizzing by, the whole world and nothing at all right at my doorstep. These are the times I think, “Whatever happened to that quite little life I never wanted?”

I press the accelerator down and listen to the steady rhythm of my tire tracks on the seams in the road—this bump, that bump, pothole, and again. The tendons of my heart, weary and slack-jawed from battle, seem to gaze with longing, lustful eyes at the life I once thought I couldn’t escape and now don’t think I’ll ever inhabit. A world of baby showers and tea parties and quiet nights spent at home. A world of 2+2=4, and get-togethers, and cooking dinner while on the phone.

It’s not that I don’t want to get married or have babies, it’s that the quiet life I always assumed I’d have is now clearly and utterly beyond my reach. Sure, I'd always had visions of great halls and magnificent journeys and seeing lands and shaking hands my friends at home had never dreamed of, but on these lonely nights when the boulevard stretches in front of me and I find myself weary from a hard-day’s fight, I think of what my life could have been. Quiet. Steady. Happy, in a confined sort of way.

This is not to say that my beautiful friends’ lives that are married with children and living at home aren’t full of unpredictability and adventure… I know their lives are great in their own way. It’s just different. Maybe I long for the days that will never come-- the days when I would get married right out of school and settle down and have our one bedroom apartment and go into the ministry, or have children and stay home and cook while the nice man who matches me goes out to work each day-- because I know I'm finally safe from them. All my life I squirmed and writhed at the idea that that life was inescapable, my wild heart chafed at the idea of walking into what I saw before me. “You need to be TAMED,” one woman said. I thought those days couldn’t be helped, and I nearly went crazy at the thought. Now I mourn for them.

All I’ve ever seen of adulthood are locked doors at night and one bedroom apartments and women as wives, and now I find myself in this distant land of studio apartments and auditions, feeling the labor pains as I birth this dream and destiny I’ve been carrying around in my heart all this time. I’m journeying to the kingdom, to the seat my Father has prepared for me. But there are moments as I’m wrestling through the thickets outside the palace walls, passion surging as I battle day and night against the legions that seem set against me, that my weary heart turns to home.